People Are Seeking God in Chatbots

Delphine Collins, a 43-year-old preschool teacher, used to go to McDonald’s for breakfast before work. She’d always order the Big Breakfast — eggs, sausage and pancakes — as the sun turned Detroit’s skyline pink. She stopped going, though, when a woman in her neighborhood was stabbed to death while working there.

Collins, who fled Liberia’s civil war years ago, turned to a spiritual chatbot for comfort. It offered a psalm and said that “the Scriptures remind us of God’s power to heal and restore.” She said it helped.

She isn’t alone. Tens of millions of people are turning to A.I.-powered religious apps that mimic conversations with clergy — or even God.

These apps are rocketing to the top of Apple’s App Store. Bible Chat, a Christian app, has more than 30 million downloads. Hallow, a Catholic app, was Apple’s most-downloaded app at one point last year, ahead of Netflix, Instagram and TikTok. The apps are attracting tens of millions of dollars in investments, and people are paying up to $70 a year for subscriptions. Now, other apps — like Pray.com, a platform that encourages people to pray and has about 25 million downloads — are rolling out chatbots, too.

I’ve been reporting on these apps for a story we published today. It was part of my work on Believing, a new Times newsletter on modern religion and spirituality that we’re launching today. (Sign up to get Believing each week.)

Below, I explain why these chatbots are so popular, as well as what concerns they raise.

Personalized guidance

In religious texts, the protagonists are often ghosted: Moses wandered in the desert. Job’s suffering seemingly had no end. Muhammad petitioned heaven and, for a period, found silence. Their predicament is universal. People often seek cosmic help in their toughest moments and then wait for a response.

To some, this was a business opportunity. Tech founders realized chatbots could offer people the instant, personalized support that clergy can’t always provide.

Krista Rogers, who is 61 and lives in Xenia, Ohio, goes to church regularly and uses religious apps. She also turns to a chatbot when she has spiritual questions that she doesn’t necessarily want to ask her pastor, including about remarriage after divorce. “It is more low-stakes,” she said of talking to a chatbot. Plus, she added, “you don’t want to disturb your pastor at 3 in the morning.”

Several religious leaders told me they were supportive of the chatbots as long as they complement — but don’t replace — traditional religious communities.

“There is a whole generation of people who have never been to a church or synagogue,” said Rabbi Jonathan Romain, a leader in Britain’s Reform Judaism movement. “Spiritual apps are their way into faith.”

Others are more wary. “The curmudgeon in me says there is something good about really, really wrestling through an idea, or wrestling through a problem, by telling it to someone,” said Fr. Mike Schmitz, a Catholic priest and podcaster. “I don’t know if that can be replaced.”

He is also worried about data privacy. “I wonder if there isn’t a larger danger in pouring your heart out to a chatbot,” he said. “Is it at some point going to become accessible to other people?”

Seeking omniscience

In the past few years, chatbots have become so many things — tutors, therapists, research assistants and engineers — that their foray into chaplaincy may seem unremarkable. This area of life, though, is different.

Religions are in the business of omniscience. They promise answers to the unknowable, encounters with the mysterious, and communion with the divine. While chatbots can seem all-knowing, they’re only a facsimile. They borrow the aggregated wisdom of the internet, but they are incapable of cultivating their own. (At least, for now!)

Many people have devoted their entire human lives to spiritual contemplation; chatbots offer replies in about three seconds. Still, they are shaping how people think about huge, eternal concerns — salvation, deliverance, confession.

Karen Fugelo, who works at a middle school in Pennsylvania, has turned to religious apps for advice on perhaps the most urgent of spiritual matters — death. “My mother is going to be 95 and reaching the end of her life’s journey,” she said. On Hallow, Fugelo asked the chatbot “how to prepare myself as well as my mother for going to be with God.”

That’s also what Laurentiu Balasa had in mind when he created Bible Chat, after the death of his own father eventually brought him back to church.

“People come to us with all different types of challenges: mental health issues, well-being, emotional problems, work problems, money problems,” Balasa told me. “I believe this is a new way of approaching faith.”

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THE SUNDAY DEBATE

Why do students’ reading scores keep falling?

Social media. The drop aligns with when social media platforms began targeting our youth. “The circumstantial evidence is sufficiently strong to justify more experimentation with bell-to-bell phone bans in schools,” Martin West writes for Education Week.

Parents. Many adults don’t know how to read, or read only at a primary school level, and it’s getting worse. “A major focus must be in investing in educating entire families,” Eugene Scott writes for The Boston Globe.

FROM OPINION

Profanity has become too common, and it’s making the world seem smaller and meaner, Mark Edmundson writes.

Here’s a column by Carlos Lozada on the Kirk assassination.

The Emmys: They’re tonight. Read what to watch for and how you can tune in, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern.

Your pick: The Morning’s most-clicked link yesterday was about hotels where you can swim in natural waters.

Film: Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming version of “Frankenstein” offers a new interpretation of the monster: It will appear newly born rather than repaired, with no stitches.

“Fit for Life”: Marilyn Diamond, who wrote a blockbuster diet book, died at 81. She attracted millions of adherents to a fruit-and-vegetable-rich regimen but also drew sharp criticism from the medical establishment.

SPORTS

College football: Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz collected his 206th win as a Big Ten coach, surpassing the Ohio State legend Woody Hayes. The record came in Ferentz’s 27th year with the Hawkeyes.

“The Secret of Secrets,” by Dan Brown: Dan Brown is back, and once again he delivers a novel that reads like a very entertaining movie. The sixth installment in the Robert Langdon series opens with the mysterious near-death of a woman in Prague. Langdon, Brown’s long-adventuring professor of symbology, happens to be in town, and he must rescue his plus-one, who has been targeted by a mysterious organization after making a significant breakthrough in the field of human consciousness. Capers abound, as they tend to do in a Brown vehicle. This one also happens to be “a wistful testament to the power of the printed word,” our critic writes. “At a time when reading sometimes seems to be in terminal decline and books have ceded influence to listicles, podcasts and video, it’s heartening to pick up a fat volume that dares to insist otherwise.”

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THE INTERVIEW

This week’s subject for “The Interview” is the writer-director Cameron Crowe, who is publishing a memoir, “The Uncool,” next month. In it he shares the personal dramas — of the rock ’n’ roll and family varieties — that inspired the tender self-mythologizing of his film “Almost Famous.” But the book’s tight focus means there’s a lot still left to explore, like the dissolution of his marriage, his recent career struggles, and what he saw in his most memorable leading men.

Tom Cruise was in your films “Jerry Maguire” and “Vanilla Sky.” But I’m curious for your perspective on Tom Cruise’s career over the last 10 years or so. He’s really focused on these spectacular films, the “Mission: Impossible” movies. Do you think his interests as a storyteller have just diverged from the kind of work that he was making with you?

I see that there’s a time coming where he’s going to segue into character roles as strongly as he segued into doing action movies of the highest quality. That Paul Newman character phase is just around the corner and will fry people’s minds. I’ll tell you one little thing: I have the same lawyer as Clint Eastwood, and he invited me to a dinner party. He sat me next to Clint Eastwood, and I was so nervous. What do you say to Clint Eastwood? So I’m sitting there and Clint Eastwood leans over and says, “Tom Cruise.” And I go: “Oh, man, Tom Cruise.” And he goes, “In a hundred years, they’re gonna look back — that’s the career, Tom Cruise’s career.”

You know, even as a younger man, you were writing these battered idealist characters: Jerry Maguire, Lloyd Dobler in “Say Anything.” But since you wrote those characters, you’ve experienced so much more life — more ups, more downs. So I wonder if you think about those characters any differently at 68 than you did when you wrote them? Also, what’s the state of your own idealism?

The fires of my own idealism burn brightly. It’s kind of how I live. I love all those characters. Is that crazy? I love them because they’re part of my family in a way. They all still speak to me in a way. And sitting here talking, it does make me want to capture things that are happening in my life right now, too. I want to be that person that writes about my age group in some way or another, as I get older. I’ve got some catching up to do.

Read more of the interview here or watch a longer version of the interview on our YouTube channel.

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE